Carmen Amengual
Artists-in-Residence
March 2 - March 30 2024
Automata welcomes interdisciplinary artist Carmen Amengual for an extended residency, as part of our ongoing Automata Residency Project.
While in residence, Carmen will be develolping a political “operetta” using experimental filmmaking and puppetry techniques. In this work, animated objects will discuss hot topics in current politics (immigration, militarization, climate change, the economy, etc.), engaging with the ongoing crisis of democracy and the rise of authoritarianism in the West.
The objects are animated as marionettes, as they sing, dance and present their arguments. The goal of the piece is to invite the viewer to seriously consider this crisis and its historical manifestations, and the ways that violent language gets normalized. The piece experiments with absurdist humor, songs, and a script documenting the uses and the normalization of authoritarian political rhetoric and policies.
About the Artist:
Carmen Amengual is an interdisciplinary artist from Argentina based in Los Angeles. Through engagement with research, archives, literature, myths, and oral histories, her work examines the interstice between memory, biography and history. Her projects encompass research, film, sculpture, painting, sound, text, and installation strategies to explore the emergence of collective imaginaries, identity formations, and conceptions of time and history that condition the political imagination. Her works examine the way historical experience is transmitted intergenerationally, rearticulating (hi)stories of individual and collective resistance, and excavating their emancipatory potential.
Amengual has exhibited at Artists Space, New York; Table, Chicago; Human Resources, Echo Park Film Center, and E.D. Freeman Gallery, Los Angeles; Biquini Wax, Mexico City; and Museo Trabucco, Buenos Aires. She was Assistant Curator at the Gallery at REDCAT in Los Angeles, and Research Fellow and Assistant Curator for the Getty PST: LA/LA project The Words of Others: León Ferrari and Rhetoric in Times of War. Amengual is a Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program 2021-22 Studio Fellow, a recipient of the 2022-24 Vera List Center for Arts and Politics artist fellowship and a 2024 Creative Capital awardee. She graduated in Comparative Literature at the University of Buenos Aires, and holds an MFA from CalArts.